January13, 2007:
Microsoft Corporation admitted that it had worked with the NSA
(National Security Agency) to improve the security of its new operating system;
Vista. Within the next four years, Vista should be operating on over 600
million computers. That makes the state of security on Vista a matter of
national importance to the United States. The U.S. government uses Microsoft
operating systems on almost all of its computers, as do most government
employees at home. Troops going overseas often take a laptop computer with
them, and that computer usually runs on a Microsoft operating system. While the
NSA provided its testing and evaluation services for free, it actually got a
lot in return. For example, NSA engineers got access to Vista source code, and
the "inner secrets" of Vista. It's also suspected, but no one will discuss it,
that NSA was able to get some secret features added, that would give the United
States an edge in any future Cyber War. For that reason, countries like China
are trying to switch all Chinese users to non-Microsoft operating systems.